Here's how Reddit responded to CEO Ellen Pao's exit

Josh Edelson/Bloomberg via Getty Images While vitriol against the Reddit chief executive Ellen Pao dominated the site in the weeks leading up to her resignation on Friday, in the hours after her departure discussions centered on whether this was the company's plan and how responsible users were for her ousting.

Tensions over the growth of the social-forum website - Reddit now attracts 164 million readers a month - were on full display last week after the company fired Victoria Taylor, its director of talent who ran the site's popular Ask Me Anything sessions.

Reddit quickly filled with anti-Pao sentiments, and about 300 subreddits were closed by moderators in protest. An online petition to dismiss Pao collected more than 210,000 signatures.

Steve Huffman, a Reddit founder and former CEO, will return to the top job.

In a post announcing Huffman's return, board member Sam Altman said he was sickened by some of things that had been written on the site about Pao.

"People are still people even if there is internet between you," he said.

While such messages were significantly less prevalent on the site following Pao's resignation, they could be found on corners of the site. Nazi symbols, expletives and crude photoshops of Pao dominated the r/iAmA_troll_AmA subreddit.

Threads that had been used to attack Pao, like r/CircleJerk, had a celebratory if not particularly aggressive tone. The r/Ellen_Pao_Hate thread remained mild, with few active users or updates.

Across the site, users questioned if Pao was a scapegoat for the company - a theory introduced, fittingly, in posts on the r/conspiracy thread last month and last week.

In response to similar questions, Altman said: "It's simply not true - not sure how to better put it to bed."

Reddit hired Pao in April 2013 and she took over as interim chief executive in November 2014. She became the figurehead for gender discrimination in Silicon Valley, during a lawsuit against her former employer Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers.